Securing votes as the war fades

With 17 new travel alerts, no-one is less secure than Simon Crean, writes Geoff Kitney.

They could be two different wars, the one to which John Howard sent the troops and the one from which he is now welcoming them home. The war the troops went to was a war to strip Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction and to prevent him giving his terrorist brothers in the al-Qaeda organisation access to these stockpiles.

The war they are coming home from is a war of liberation, a war which freed the oppressed Iraqi people from the yoke of Saddam's brutal and murderous regime and offers the hope of freedom and democracy taking root in the Middle East.

Australians obviously prefer the war the troops are coming home from. The polls that showed, before war in Iraq was declared, deep misgivings in the community about the involvement of Australian troops now show great pride over the role the troops played.

Howard is basking in the glory of having made a highly dangerous political call and got it right. And the community appears to have little stomach for raking over the coals of the debate about the case for going to war.

The collective sentiment now seems to be of great relief that it's over, great pride in the armed forces and now let's forget about it and leave the discussion about the rights and wrongs of the war to the historians.

It's a bit like the border protection issue. The revelations about the Government's dishonesty on the children overboard issue hardly made a dent in its standing and the standing of the key figures who behaved dishonourably. The rights and wrongs of that affair have already been left to the historians to debate.

To the political cynics who measure politics only by what the polls show, the bottom line in both issues is that Howard brilliantly outmanoeuvred his political opponents and enhanced his standing as one of Australia's outstanding political leaders.

So the fact that there is a vast credibility gap between the case for invading Iraq, put in its greatest detail by Howard in a speech to Parliament on February 4, and the reasons the invasion was declared a triumph by Howard, in a speech to Parliament on May 14, is becoming a footnote to history.

The footnote will show that on February 4, Howard said that unless the world acted to disarm Saddam he would "emerge with his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons intact", an arsenal described by the PM as "a massive program". In this speech Howard referred more than 30 times in 55 minutes to the threat posed by Saddam's WMDs.

The footnote will show that in his speech on May 14 marking the fall of Saddam's regime, Howard made just six references in a speech of 75 paragraphs to WMDs, saying in justification that the hunt for the weapons would not be easy because Saddam had broken them up and hidden them.

Howard was right about the degree of difficulty. Since Baghdad fell on April 9 and despite a huge effort by the coalition to locate WMDs, none has been found. So fruitless has the search been, The New York Times reported yesterday, that the US Central Intelligence Agency has begun a detailed internal investigation to see if its intelligence on Saddam's WMDs might have been wrong, a possibility that should cause great alarm given that the CIA is the front-line intelligence agency in the war against terrorism.

If Howard's decision to take Australia to war was based on intelligence information from Australia's most important ally that was wrong, you would hope that at the very least Howard would want a "please explain" from the Americans.

Even if the community's view about the Iraq war now is, as the Government clearly believes, that the ends justify the means, Australians will want to be reassured that their security is in safer hands than is suggested by the alarming emerging evidence of a massive coalition intelligence failure over Iraq's weapons program.

There is important domestic politics in this. While the electorate may not now care about what happens to postwar Iraq, as it seems not to care about the disaster that's postwar Afghanistan, it cares about its own security.

One promise Howard made about the rewards of Australia being involved in disarming Iraq was that it would help make Australia more secure. In the 40 days since the end of the Iraq war, as the Opposition's foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, points out, the Government has issued 17 new travel alerts warning of increased terrorism threats. Rudd reports that the most frequently asked question of him now as he travels around Australia is "are we more secure because of the war in Iraq?".

It does not automatically follow from this, however, that if voters decide they are less secure because of the Iraq war that this will turn politics on its head and make it a political winner for Labor. What it does mean is that the security issue will continue to be a powerful issue in domestic politics.

This is not good news for Labor because a threatening world security environment always favours the conservatives. This reality was strongly reaffirmed by the fact that Simon Crean's anti-war stance did nothing for his, or Labor's, poll ratings even when Australians were anti-war before the Iraq conflict started. Party research showed that, though voters did not like the idea of war in Iraq, they still preferred Howard's strength on the US alliance.

Crean's survival strategy hinges on the hope that as the Iraq war fades into history, he can get traction on the domestic issues most likely to favour Labor - health and education. Iraq might be fading, but the terrorism threat and security remain key issues on the political agenda.

Labor badly needs credibility on security issues to neutralise the Coalition's advantage and get the battle onto the ground most favourable to it. This is acknowledged by both the pro- and anti-Crean forces in the Labor Party. Mark Latham, a key Crean ally, said in a speech on security this week that security was "a basic Labor value".

Latham argues that the starting point now for Labor to convince voters of its credibility on security is an end to the destabilisation of Crean because no message can get through while leadership sniping drowns that message.

But Crean's enemies are using his vulnerability on security issues as part of the destabilisation. Their argument is that there is now an entrenched perception of Crean as weak on security and that Labor has no hope of neutralising the issue while he is there.

What is obvious is that the most important war for Labor in the immediate future is the one over its leadership. For as long as it remains unresolved, John Howard is the only winner.